Three Miles Past Calvary

Normally I do pace runs along my Hellgate route, through Astoria, since it involves only a few turns, not so many street lights, and only a couple of effort-changing hills. But this only works if I get out early, before pedestrians and deliverymen take over the sidewalks–on Saturday I slept in and thus needed to find another route. I haven’t ran back there in over a year, but I thought I’d go give the service road beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway a shot. I could run there as my warm up (0.6 miles), pace out my 3 miles, then jog home. In theory, all good. 

I live north of the BQE and north of Queens Boulevard, so I had to head south on 41st Street to get to the service road. I do like visiting over there every now and then, since I used to live there when I first moved to Sunnyside; and also, I like looking at the houses, with their itty bitty front lawns and kitschy front porches. The sun was already glaring (at 10 AM) so I tried to stay in the shade as much as possible. 

When I hit the service road, I hit my lap button and took off. Not a pedestrian in sight, and nothing but flat, shaded sidewalk as far as the eye could see. Along the way, I passed the Calvary Cemetery, sliced in half by the BQE. The sprawling lawns, grown over the decaying bones of New Yorkers from earlier eras, soothe me. I’ve enjoyed shorter, easier runs along the paths, taking comfort in the resting dead; but today I was running from them as fast as I could. 

After about half a mile I’d passed all the gravestones and came across a deep, lengthy decline. There would be no way to negotiate that hill on the way back at anything approximating an 8:40 pace (my target). So, I decided to fly down the hill in an attempt to build a deficit against my return trip. Ultimately this worked out (my splits were 8:45, 8:39 and 8:38) but it wasn’t any fun. My heart rate hovered between 180 and 190 bpm for the last mile and a half, even though my uphill pace slowed to 11 minutes per mile, and I was gasping for breath and sweating bullets to manage just that. The electronic chime of Little G’s lap alert at Mile 3 was one of the prettiest sounds I was to hear all day, and I jogged as easily as possible south along 41^st Street. As I returned back towards my side of the boulevard, I left the dead behind me, both humbled and strengthened by their northern hill.